Abigail Pesta is an award-winning journalist who has lived and worked around the world, from New York to London to Hong Kong. Her investigative and feature reporting has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Glamour, Newsweek and others. She is a vice president of the Overseas Press Club in New York. Read Abby's short stories at Fine Words Butter No Parsnips, a journal of art and fiction. Follow her on Twitter at @Abigail Pesta.

Entries by Abigail Pesta

Frank Rodriguez is a family man, a husband and father of four daughters. He is also a convicted sex offender. As such, Frank, 34, is prohibited from coaching his children's soccer teams. Neighbors and employers can find him on the sex-offender registry, alongside pedophiles and child pornographers. An iPhone app...

What do you do when your husband disappears from your bed one night, leaves you with $6 million in debt, and turns out to be a total fraud? If you're Michelle Kramer, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get a Ph.D. in psychology -- so that you can...

Noor Almaleki, a pretty 20-year-old, was walking across a suburban Phoenix parking lot in 2009 when her father slammed into her in his Jeep Grand Cherokee, fracturing her face and spine, and ultimately killing her. Why? He was angry at his daughter for refusing to marry an Iraqi man --...

The Pearl Project began as a journalism course three years ago at Georgetown University. This class had no ordinary syllabus. Its goal: nothing less than to expose the hidden details and motivations behind the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The class drew...

Maureen Dowd, matchmaker? That's right, says writer Helena Andrews. She writes in Marie Claire this month that when she was a reporter at politico.com a few years ago, Dowd set her up with Mr. Love. That would be Reggie Love, also known as Barack Obama's personal aide. The...

Here's a question for the ages: How is it that high-profile men like John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer don't realize they'll get busted for cheating? Because the instant they're elected to office, their egos go wild, says Jenny Sanford, the (soon-to-be-ex) wife of South Carolina's philandering governor, Mark Sanford.

How do you cure an incurable disease? Ask Kate Milliken. The 37-year-old New York City video producer was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis -- the autoimmune disease that causes everything from muscle weakness to complete paralysis -- three years ago. Today, she's better. And she has before-and-after MRI scans, as well...

You think slavery went out with Abraham Lincoln? Ask my friend Sreypov Chan about that. She's a cute young Cambodian woman with a love for Kelly Clarkson songs and Tom & Jerry cartoons. But when she was seven years old, her mom sold her into sexual slavery.

Jennifer Wilkov will tell you. Accused of being involved in a small real-estate scam, she spent four months in New York City's notoriously violent Rikers Island prison, even though she tells Marie Claire magazine this month that she's innocent.

It seems that even bloodthirsty terrorists can fall googly-eyed in love.

Reporter Paul Cruickshank, in the March issue of Marie Claire, tells the disquieting tale of how a middle-class Belgian woman fell in love with a budding Islamic terrorist, married him, and allegedly became a terrorist herself.

On paper at least, 2008 was the year that women took it on the chin: The electorate sent Hillary packing, Marion Jones fessed up to doping, and Sarah Palin couldn't name any newspapers she reads. Still, we at Marie Claire have calculated that womanhood managed to clock in with...